Feminism was a product of North-Western Europe (and the settler Anglosphere) for very specific cultural and institutional reasons. The women’s movement had to come out of a culture which already gave women’s choices sufficient standing, where elite women could organise and deploy resources, where kin-group loyalties did not dominate and constrain, and where explicit political bargaining was already part of the institutional landscape. This combination of features occurred in no other cultures other than in the societies that descended from Medieval Latin Christendom.
As I noted in my previous post, European and Chinese settlers in the American West provided a revealing natural experiment about the difference in that status of, and possibilities for, women in a society that had sanctified single-spouse marriage and (apart from some fringe regions) eliminated kin groups (Christian Europe and its descendant societies) as against a society with polygynous marriage and powerful kin groups (China).
The Church’s sanctification of a women’s consent as necessary for marriage elevated the status of women’s choices. As did the Church’s (admittedly bequest-hungry) support for the property and testamentary rights of women. Single-spouse marriage meant that elite women habitually had access to resources and were acknowledged as public organisers of resources.
The lack of kin groups required the development of alternative mechanisms for social cooperation. It also meant that women’s fertility was not an asset of their kin group, so giving more power to their consent being required for marriage.
Women’s fertility being an asset of their kin group — and connections within the kin group being essential for social standing, risk management, income prospects, wealth protection, etc — are fundamental drivers of (dis)honour killings; fatal enforcement of the restrictions on choices for women, with family members killing their own daughters in order to protect their standing within the kin group and local community.
Open source law
That in Christian Europe law was human (i.e. was not based on revelation) meant that those cooperative mechanisms could be entrenched in law, and so could the bargains they came to. A long history of explicit political bargaining developed with associated institutional structures. Structures that were most extensively established in what became Parliamentary states.
In both Islam and Brahmin civilisation, law was based on revelation and dominated by religious scholars (ulema) or priestly castes (Brahmins). A legal system can create new precedents. It cannot create new revelations. While the varying capacity to enforce rulings on people and groups affects the evolution of revelation-based legal systems, as does having to deal with new circumstances, it is not possible within revelation-based law to get together and legally create, ratify or entrench new social bargains. This made it much harder to develop alternative social-cooperation mechanisms to kin groups.
Moreover, neither Sharia nor Brahmin law were positive for the status of women. Sharia famously weights the testimony of male and female witnesses differently. While Manusmrti, the most famous Brahmin legal source, explicitly banned women from being independent and required wives to threat their husbands as if they were gods. This is, after, the legal-religious culture that gave us suttee (aka sati).
Between kin groups treating the fertility of women as an asset, dishonour killings, polygynous marriage lowering the status of women, and law enforcing (even sanctifying) subordinate status on women, other state-society civilisations were far more patriarchal than Christian Europe and its derivatives.
In the Christian Eurosphere (Europe plus the regions where European settlers became the dominant population), the women’s movement utilised available social status, patterns and resources in new ways. It was still, however, very much a mobilising of the cultural and institutional resources that were available to be used in such a way. Hence, there is often relatively little time gap in Western societies between all men getting the vote and women getting the vote.
The emancipation sequence
The women’s movement was part of what we might call the Emancipation Sequence (banning the slave trade, banning slavery, Jewish Emancipation, Catholic Emancipation, adult male suffrage, women’s suffrage, second-wave feminism, civil rights, queer emancipation …). Two centuries of mass movements organised to expand the legal rights and social participation of previously excluded groups, utilising the structures and possibilities within societies based on Christian social dynamics.
Other civilisations produced mass movements, but they were invariably organised around religious and mystical (even occult) ideas, as other civilisations lacked well-established mechanisms for such explicit political bargaining.
The key fight of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s was over women getting unilateral control over their fertility. This put second-wave feminism in direct opposition to the Church and Christian sexual mores and teachings. This has obscured how much the women’s movement was very much a product of specifically Christian doctrines and consequent social dynamics. Hence feminism in other cultures being both derivative, and somewhat pale shadows, of its Western origins.
The retreat from moral universalism that used to be a feature of progressive politics has seen Western feminists increasingly retreat from concern for women from other cultures, using the “but that is their culture” excuse. How far would the Western women’s movement have got if their opponents could simply close down their claims with “but that is our culture”? The women’s movement may have arising in Western societies but it also did very much seek to change key aspects of Western culture. It is very odd for contemporary feminists to deny that opportunity and lever to women from other cultures.
The women’s movement was also built on the Christian roots of Western culture and social dynamics. History, it’s complicated.
[Cross-posted from Medium.]
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